


The Ice Palace

by Karis_Artemisia_Judith



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Sleeping Beauty Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 09:17:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8244134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karis_Artemisia_Judith/pseuds/Karis_Artemisia_Judith
Summary: Arendelle – 1945It had haunted his dreams for as long as he could remember—the ice palace, glittering on the mountain peak like a jeweled crown. Mysterious. Ancient.





	

_Arendelle – 1945_

It had haunted his dreams for as long as he could remember—the ice palace, glittering on the mountain peak like a jeweled crown. Mysterious. Ancient.

Many people said that it didn’t exist. It was a legend, they said. A folk tale meant to explain the unusual weather, a cautionary story to warn climbers off of the treacherous crags. There was no proof, people said. No photographic equipment had ever survived the altitude—no planes could navigate the dangerous winds that whipped around the mountain and kept it perpetually shrouded in dark, stormy clouds.

There was no ice palace, they said. Nothing but a story for children.

Kristoff knew better.

After all, they said the same thing about trolls.

He thought, sometimes, that he must have heard about the ice palace first from his mother. If he concentrated he was sure that he could remember a soft, kind voice and the feel of a hand stroking over his hair, but the face above him was always hazy, rendered in the faded shades of grey of a creased photograph.

She must have told him the story of the ice palace, because when he was taken to the orphanage at the foot of the mountain, he had stared up, as if he could see through the cloak of mist, his red-rimmed eyes searching, searching. For a moment—for the briefest heartbeat of a moment—the clouds had parted, and the sun had lanced down on the peak, and he’d seen a blaze of light. He remembered that moment more vividly than he could remember anything that came before.

Everything before was just snatches—different faces, as he was passed from hand to hand like a bad coin, until at last he’d been cast into the hands of the government. A silent boy, big for his age, who watched adults with distrust from under his shaggy blond hair. He arrived at the orphanage with nothing but a name and a photograph.

Within a year, he left the same way.

 

* * *

Now he was a man, and the ice palace rose up above him, piercing the sky with spires like sharp shards of glass.

It was a fanciful structure, like a fairy tale castle, all arches and towers, graceful curving staircases and sweeping balconies lined with the lacy curling patterns of frost for railings. It shimmered and glittered in the sunlight that filtered down through the mist, like crystal. Like spun sugar. It was just as he had seen it in his dreams, all these years. In his dreams he had walked through endless halls of ice, smooth and flawless. He had climbed up endless spirals of steps to stand level with the clouds. He had marveled, and he had searched. Searched, night after night, for something he couldn’t name.

“Dreams can be quite real,” his adoptive mother had said. Her hands had been rough, and cool like stone, but her eyes were warm. The hidden valley where he’d been raised was free of snow, and cloaked in fog from the heat of underwater springs. It had thawed him slowly, after the trolls had found him half frozen. A runaway human boy that no one wanted. His one thought, when he’d scrambled out the orphanage window, over the wall, was that he wanted to find the ice palace.

“Is it real?” he’d asked. “Is it real?”

“Real enough.”

“What about the other dream?” Kristoff had only two dreams that he could remember. One was of the ice palace, of his endless, marveling search through its halls. “What about my summer dream? Is that real?”

“Time will tell.”

His summer dream took place in a castle, too—an ordinary castle, of wood and stone. That castle was real. He’d seen it, and followed a tour guide through the public rooms. They were shabbier than he remembered from his dreams. In his dream the carpets were new and bright, the furniture unfaded. And in that dream he didn’t wander alone. The winter dream stole his breath with beauty, but he preferred his summer dream. And yet…and yet, his compulsion to find the ice palace had remained.

Beautiful, and changeless. It breathed out a chill that spoke of age. It numbed his nose and ached in his throat. The cold of countless years.

Kristoff shifted his pack on his shoulders. It had been a long hike up the mountain, and treacherous, even with the help of the trolls and their secret ways through the mountain. He’d come prepared—he’d learned to climb, scaling every other mountain in the country. He’d gathered supplies and experience. And he’d studied fairy tales. A fairy tale palace, after all, must have a tale. _Once upon a time, there was a queen who went mad, and disappeared into the mountains…Once upon a time, there was a brave princess who set out to bring back the summer…Once upon a time, there was a palace created from magic._

Studying fairy tales is easy enough, when you live with trolls. You just have to ask.

“Things come in threes. Three questions, three princes, three challenges.” He’d gotten past the first challenge, the huge monster made of snow. He’d gotten past the second, a smaller snow creature, but cunning and full of riddles. Now there would be a third.

He climbed the long staircase, an impossible arch of ice that hung in the air like a child’s wish. His boots looked too heavy, but the ice didn’t splinter under him, and his mundane rubber soles carried him up, and up. The door rose into a pointed arch. He lifted his hand to knock.

The figure that appeared before him was slight, but shrouded in heavy robes that glittered. A hood concealed everything except a pale, pointed chin, and a delicate hand that emerged from the trailing sleeve. Kristoff waited, his shoulders tense.

Fingertips touched his chest, and he felt cold. It spread through him, reached down into him, and he felt all the lonely places in his soul reverberate with it, shuddering, as if a shout had echoed through his veins. All the pain of an abandoned child, all the anger and bitterness, the sharp, cynical edges, they cut through him, overwhelming. He trembled with it, and furious tears turned to frost on his cheeks.

* * *

“Why?” In his dream, the summer girl sometimes stood outside of a locked door, her hands pressed against painted wood until it creaked. “ _Why_?”

She was hair the color of fire and skin like peaches, eyes like mountain lakes and the quick, darting grace of a bird. He’d grown up with her, in his dreams. She was a little younger, still playing with blocks and dolls, but he couldn’t blame her. He was beside her as she played solitary games, and when she talked to the air, he had answered. Sometimes he was sure that she could hear. Running up and down empty hallways, sliding down bannisters, he matched her step for step.

They grew older in tandem. He saw her practice dancing steps, curtsying to her invisible partner, and he bowed. She spent hours reading with him at her shoulder—he had to learn to read quickly, before she turned pages. She stared out of windows.

She was being fitted for a new dress. Green silk and black velvet were pinned to a dummy, and the summer girl wore undergarments that covered more of her than the girls Kristoff saw every day in town. He still looked away, blushing, knowing that he was an intruder in her world. But he didn’t try to wake himself up. He never wanted the summer dreams to end. So he stood with his back to her and listened as she hummed with excitement, her shoes whisking over the carpet as she practiced her dance.

Then the winter came.

And his summer dreams stopped.

* * *

Summer. The warmth of his hidden valley, the love of his adopted family. The memory of his summer girl, her smile so bright even in her loneliness. Heat welled up from his heart, pushing out the cold, pushing out the bitter anger. The pain was washed over, smoothed out like old scars. The numbing cold was driven away, leaving his fingertips and toes tingling as sensation returned. Ridiculously, he had to struggle not to sneeze as his nose warmed, and he rubbed at it hastily with one mitten.

The robed figure smiled, ever so faintly, and then dissipated into mist, like an exhalation of breath. Whatever the test had been, he’d passed.

Kristoff didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward, into the crystal maze of the palace. He’d walked these hallways a hundred times, a thousand, and had never known what he was seeking.

He found her in the last tower.

The bed was made of ice, spiraling icicles that arched together to form a canopy. And she was ice, too.

Kristoff stared at her. Leached of all color, he still knew her. His summer girl. Weary legs gave out and he sat with a thump on the cold slab that served as her mattress.

She lay on her back, her hands clasped over her chest. Her eyes were closed, and if he had been tempted to imagine that she was merely a sculpture of ice, the impossible delicacy of eyelashes on her cheeks would have told him the truth. Kristoff stripped off his mitten and laid his hand against the curve of her jaw. It was cold in his palm, unyielding.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he whispered. “My whole life, I’ve been looking for you.”

He leaned forward. His lips brushed hers, his breath hot against the ice as he kissed her. The warmth that flowed through him seemed to spill out, like a dam bursting, and he wished he could pour it into her. When he lifted his lips, he didn’t sit up at once—he remained slumped over her, his head bowed close to hers, his eyes closed.

Her first soft gasp of air brushed across his cheek.

* * *

The sunshine smile that she gave him was so familiar from his dreams, but it had never been directed at him before. Not until that moment in the tower, when he’d opened his eyes to see color bleeding across her still form. Pink and blue, the red of her hair, the coral of her lips, and then the blue of her eyes as they opened. She’d smiled up at him.

“Hello. I’ve been dreaming about you for so long.”

He’d helped her to sit up, steadied her as she got to her feet for the first time in a hundred years. She touched his jacket. “Your clothes are so strange. What year is it?” When he told her, she looked down at her feet for a long moment. “Oh. Then everyone I knew…” Her head leaned into his shoulder. “I guess it’s just as well that I didn’t know many people. Except you. I knew you. What’s your name?”

“Kristoff.”

“I’m Anna.”

Anna. In all those years, he’d never known her name. There had never been anyone else in the dream to say it, and in her games she always called herself different things—Esmeralda, Rosabelle, Aurora. But she was Anna. And she was a princess.

“Used to be a princess,” she added. “A hundred years ago. Are you a prince? In fairy stories it’s always a prince, but…well, no offense if you are a prince, but I’d like it better if you weren’t, really.”

“I’m not. I mean, the trolls who adopted me are kind of the leaders of the tribe, so I guess you could say I’m like a prince because of that, but not really.”

“A troll prince.” Her fingertips had brushed across his jaw. “I think I can live with that.”

On the steps of the ice palace they paused, hand in hand, and Anna looked back.

“I had a sister,” she murmured. “She’s the one who—she made it. This place.”

Kristoff thought of the cloaked figure who had stood at the door and tested him. “I think she was here,” he said. “I think…she was watching over you, until I could come.”

Anna nodded. She kissed her fingertips, touching them to the doorframe.

As their feet touched the far side of the gorge, the ice stair behind them melted into mist. The palace crumbled slowly, sinking to the earth as drifts of snow, to slowly melt and run down the mountain, feeding the rivers and nourishing the land.

“It’s not easy to get down the mountain, but the trolls will help—there are secret ways.” Her hand was small and warm in his, and he squeezed it gently. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.”


End file.
